Review of Intellectual Impostures

Sokal and Bricmont in their exposé of allegedly meaningless statements
about
science by recent French philosophers take errors of particular applications
of philosophical ideas to science as refutations of the whole general
framework utilized. They also seem to think that taking snippets out of
context is sufficient to expose the "fashionable nonsense." In the early
twentieth century, British analytic philosophers such as Bertrand Russell
and A. N. Whitehead did the same with Hegel on mathematics. After deciding
not to bother to read Hegel because of distaste for what he wrote about
mathematics, Whitehead was later surprised to learn that his own relational
process philosophy resembled that of Hegel in various respects.

Sokal and Bricmont, like a number of other physicist and mathematician
science warriors, strive to maintain a view of science that preserves the
attitudes of the past century by reinterpreting the apparently unsettling
developments of twentieth century science. They wish to reassure
non-scientists that chaos theory and quantum mechanics have not radically
changed to nature of the universe presented by science. They debunk claims
that twentieth century science has undermined determinism or the
independence of the observer from the observed.

During the first half of the twentieth century, many leading theorists of
modern physics were also philosophers and humanistic scholars. Werner
Heisenberg first learned of atoms, not in a physics text, but from reading
Plato's Timaeus. He claimed that later reading of the same work (in Greek)
for relaxation during lunch break had some influence on his conception of
uncertainty in physical reality. Schrödinger took his lab notes in
classical Greek and wrote as did Heisenberg about the Presocratic
philosophers in his search for a way to understand subatomic reality.

After W.W.II, with the congealing of the official interpretation of quantum
theory, and the rise of big science, philistinism took over. Feynman, a
leading genius of the period, despised philosophy, though he often
misrepresented the positions of the philosophers he ridiculed. His proudly
dismissive attitude toward philosophers was linked with unconscious
personifications of Nature and an implicit philosophy of a plurality of
causes in mechanics resembling that (he would be horrified to hear) of
Aristotle. One perceptive reviewer of Feynman's anecdotes says that
someone familiar only with the beauty of Feynman's physics papers, would, on
reading his books of humorous anecdotes, react like Antonio Salieri on his
first encounter with Mozart. Physicist and science essayist Jeremy
Bernstein, in reaction to the mention of the influence of Hindu thought on
Schrödinger's later writings, replied simply "Yogic, Schmogic," and
claimed
recently that only an historian of physics would have any interest in
reading Niels Bohr, the creator of the standard, "Copenhagen interpretation"
of quantum mechanics. Einstein and Heisenberg read the philosopher Kant as
teenagers, and the Kantian strain in Bohr and Heisenberg is an alien realm
to late twentieth century Anglo-American physicists.

The changed situation in twentieth century philosophy is similar. In the
1920s, not only Henri Bergson, but also Whitehead, and George Herbert Mead
with their "objective relativism," strove mightily to grapple with the
general philosophical consequences of Einstein's relativity theory (whatever
one may think of their particular conclusions). Today in Anglo-American
philosophy the philosophers of science discuss such issues, but usually
without attempting in any way to discuss their implications for culture or
for patterns of thought in general, saying, with W. V. O. Quine, that
"Philosophy of science is philosophy enough." On the other hand, most
general analytical social philosophers don't even try to grapple with the
consequences of contemporary science and math for our worldview, and often
uncritically and tacitly presuppose older, flawed interpretations. (One
source of the "overdetermined" support for Sokal and Bricmont's position,
besides neo-conservatives denouncing "political correctness" and traditional
literary critics angry at French theory, is the community of analytical
philosophers who reject continental philosophy.) Would Sokal and Bricmont
be happier if general philosophers were to ignore science totally? Would
they admire the Oxford ordinary language philosophers of the 1950s who
sneeringly ignored both science and politics as irrelevant to "ordinary
language" (the supposed font of all wisdom)? Would they agree with
neo-conservative Straussian Alan Bloom that science has no relevance to
human life? They ought to welcome the sometimes fumbling attempts of recent
philosophers to make sense of science as a cultural phenomenon and to
speculate about the cosmological metaphysics that science reveals.

Alan Sokal calls the founders of quantum mechanics Bohr and Heisenberg,
"vulgarizers (in both senses)."(p. 255 fn 14) Odd that they should have
invented the things of which they are mere vulgarizers. Similarly, Sokal
and Bricmont sharply distinguish Einstein's "pedagogy" (discussed by Latour,
and explicitly called pedagogy by him, contra Sokal and Bricmont) and
Einstein's real theory (p. 116). What they ignore is that the early
Einstein (who credited Hume and Mach for inspiration, and Mach in turn
credited Berkeley) really did approach relativity in terms of the thought
experiments concerning possible measurements by conscious observers that he
describes in his popular book. Logical positivism and Percy Bridgman's
operationalism were inspired precisely by this approach of Einstein.

Sokal and Bricmont likewise are distrustful of philosophical claims
concerning implications of chaos theory (Ch. 7, pp. 125-136 ). Sokal
satirizes and with Bricmont certainly exhibits and exposes some confused and
misleading statements about non-linearity and chaos. Yet not all such
extrapolations from chaos theory are solely the product of mathematical
ignorance. One wonders what they think of André Lichnerowicz, one of the
great mathematicians our time, lending his name and authority to a
collaborative work that, although it does not, like Prigogine or Bohm, use
the word postmodernism, ranges afield into speculative applications of chaos
theory to biology, economics and philosophy, mentioning suspect, supposedly
anti-scientific figures such as Bergson, Tielhard d' Chardin, Freud, and
Foucault.

In the original French version of their book, Sokal and Bricmont discuss
Bergson's misunderstandings of Einstein and then trace what they consider
the sad history of French philosophers praising Bergson. Bergson probably
suffered from writing too well and deceptively simply. This made him
extraordinarily popular, that led to his soon being dismissed by "serious
philosophers." Part of Bergson's loss of respect in the English speaking
world is due to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (with a
quotation from which Sokal and Bricmont's chapter on Bergson begins) that
portrays Bergson's intuitionism as proto-Nazi, when in fact Bergson died
from illness contracted while waiting on a bread line in occupied France
after he refused the Nazis' offer to give him special treatment as an
"honorary Aryan."

Before dismissing Bergson as a fool, and his philosophy of the intuition of
time and of the fundamental reality of process as nonsense, one needs to
separate several issues. Bergson indeed made mistakes (pointed out by
Einstein himself) in arguing about special relativity theory. Bergson
himself recognized his lack of expertise in physics, and refused to allow
further editions of his work to appear during the thirties. Do these
mistakes mean that Bergson's views on time ought to be dismissed, or that
his philosophical claims about time have no value? Bergson was not,
contrary to Bricmont's opinion, trying to "refute" Einstein. Bergson
rejected Newtonian absolute space and he accepted the demise of the
classical aether, unlike a number of reactionary philosophical holdouts
against relativity theory. Several physicists, such as de Broglie, Watanabe
and Costa de Beauregard have seen value in Bergson's ideas in relation to
wave mechanics and thermodynamics, despite his particular errors in
relativity theory. Two major mathematicians whom Sokal and Bricmont cannot
accuse of ignorance of mathematics made sympathetic use of Bergson. Norbert
Wiener, in his Cybernetics, opened with a discussion of "Newtonian vs.
Bergsonian time," and A. N. Whitehead incorporated parts of Bergson's
philosophy of process into his own interpretation of relativity theory.

The spirit of Bergson's earlier writings contradicts the letter of his
unfortunate sally into relativity theory. Bergson's own, earlier Matter and
Memory contradicted the later denial of multiple temporal rhythms in his
discussion of relativity theory. Milic Capek points out in Bergson's
emphasis on the difference between time and space and his denial of
absolutely separate material particles fits well with much of relativity
theory and quantum mechanics, but that Bergson's own treatment of time in
reaction to Einstein mistakenly treated Minkowski's diagram as a dreaded
"spatialization of time" similar to that of classical treatments of time as
a fourth dimension in d'Alembert and others (a mistake shared, by the way,
by some of the physicist defenders of Einstein's theory as portraying a
"block universe" without genuine change).

At the center of the debate between Bergson and Einstein was the "twin
paradox." If rapid travel shows down time, then a twin sent into space at
high speed would return younger than the twin who remained on earth. Yet if
velocity is relative, should not the twin on earth be younger than the space
traveler, since, relative to the space traveler, the twin on earth receded
and then approached at high speed? Even if Bergson's claims about the twin
paradox are confused, that's not to say that the twin paradox is totally
cleared up. When physicist Herbert Dingle argued in Nature for the genuine
paradoxicality of the twin paradox, a number of physicists indignantly
claimed the solution was clear and simple, but gave "obvious solutions"
inconsistent with one another. Marder edited a whole book of such "obvious
solutions" to the twin paradox some of which are mutually incompatible.

One point that Sokal and Bricmont miss making because of their fragmented
approach to out-of-context quotes is the suspicious resemblance of Latour's
"third observer" in his account of special relativity theory to Bergson's
account (possibly via Deleuze's book on Bergson). Latour rarely gives
reference to the sources of his ideas, preferring to appear to have created
them out of whole cloth. He claims that in Einstein's special relativity
theory there is a third observer who is describing the two observers
mentioned in the exposition. Bergson makes a similar move in claiming that
there is a unitary time subsuming the relative times of the two observers in
Einstein. Sometimes, as in Latour's account, this is the time of the third
observer subsuming the other two. Latour and his critics, as well as his
physicist defender David Mermin confuse the issue of the number of physical
"observers" needed in special relativity with the philosophical question of
whether in thinking about some topic we are also thinking about ourselves
thinking about it. (This latter issue leads to the old paradoxical claim
that one cannot imagine oneself dead or unconscious, because one is
imagining oneself consciously imagining oneself dead or unconscious. ) The
third observer is not one of the observers in the physical system, but is
this self-conscious theorist or reader thinking about the other two physical
observers. Both Latour, Sokal and Bricmont, and Mermin treat this
transcendental conscious observer as if it were an actual, physical observer
located somewhere in the physical space-time being described.

Ironically, David Bohm, whose deterministic quantum theory is admired by
many of the physicist science warriors, has speculated in manners strangely
similar to Bergson concerning notions that there might be other ways to
think about or make models of physical processes other than the classical
ones. This has been elaborated on by Capek, and the suggestions resemble
in many respects Bohm's suggestions about trying new imaginary models and
rejecting Bohr and Heisenberg's claim that we are trapped conceptually in
classical models -- that supposedly prevents us from thinking directly about
quantum reality.

One philosopher who makes use of Bergson's ideas concerning time and process
is Gilles Deleuze. Sokal and Bricmont seem to be particularly annoyed at
Deleuze because he was excessively praised by Michel Foucault. (Deleuze and
Guattari shared many interests such as anti-psychiatry and rejection of
unitary systems, were both gay, interested in sadomasochism, and evidently
took drugs together).. Much of the rancor in the science warriors' attack
on the postmodernists seems to be jealousy at their undeserved fame. In
Bricmont's case, the perhaps undeserved Nobel Prize and excessive fame of
the popular writings of Ilya Prigogine, a fellow Belgian physicist who
occasionally mentions Bergson and postmodernism, seem to stoke the fires of
his resentment. Sokal and Bricmont should feel less of this now that they,
through the Sokal hoax and this book, themselves have achieved worldwide
fame.

Sokal and Bricmont, like many of the uncritical epigones of Deleuze
interested primarily in gay liberation, anti-psychiatry movements, focus on
Deleuze's work with the psychiatrist and political activist Felix Guattari.
Deleuze collaborated in his later life on a number of wild and unbuttoned
books with his buddy. Sokal and Bricmont treat the two together in their
critique, but have the harshest words for a passage by Guattari alone, with
which they conclude as the ultimate in nonsense. Certainly Guattari, a
lifelong rebel (whose early support of the Algerian independence and of
reform of authoritarian mental institutions was admirable) rebelled even
against the revolutionary sects he joined. His raging against the Oedipus
complex seems to betray a major one of his own. Guattari was much wilder
and sloppier in his writing than Deleuze, and the latter permitted much
looser and free-associative formulations in joint productions written with
his companion. However, Deleuze also wrote some seven academic books on
various philosophers, such as Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche, that
Sokal and Bricmont do not discuss. For instance, Deleuze's book on Leibniz,
The Fold, contains references to topology (the mathematics of continuity),
the use of which by postmodernists Sokal and Bricmont descry. Since
Leibniz was an inventor of both the calculus and analysis situs (precursor
of topology) and made the principle of continuity central to his philosophy,
these references are not guilty of the irrelevance of which Sokal and
Bricmont accuse Deleuze's other references to mathematics.

One claim that Sokal and Bricmont make throughout their work is that if the
authors they criticize and expose are using scientific metaphors to
illustrate their philosophical, psychological or literary ideas, these would
not be illuminating to an audience ignorant of science. They suggest these
scientific or mathematical examples are simply added to impress the
scientifically illiterate literateurs. This may be the case with some of
the phrases of Kristeva and Lacan. However, another use of scientific and
mathematical concepts in philosophy is as models for metaphysical
speculation. Since much of our thinking is based on images and spatial
diagrams (following Kant but pace Hegel, Wittgenstein, and others), the
precise, worked-out structures of mathematics and physics can suggest
metaphysical models. Here the mathematical models are not window-dressing
to impress the ignorant, but sources of admittedly vaguer metaphysical
extrapolations. Deleuze, in a manner similar to (though nowhere as ably
done as) Whitehead, mathematical structures are used as models for
metaphysical ideas. Sokal and Bricmont do not totally reject philosophical
thinking or even metaphysics, as they present some philosophy of science in
order to set aside skepticism and to argue against relativism and
subjectivism.

Sokal and Bricmont do comment on two of Deleuze's serious works. Bricmont
also mentions, in an open letter concerning the dropping of Bergson from the
English edition of the book that Bergson's influence on Deleuze shows the
relevance of the former. Evidently Anglo-American analytic philosophers
convinced Sokal and Bricmont to ignore Bergson in the English edition,
though several English books on Bergson have recently appeared. Ironically,
two of the passages in Deleuze that they ridicule assert that relativity
theory, measurement in quantum theory, and information in statistical
mechanics should not be interpreted subjectively.(pp. 14-150). This agrees
with Sokal and Bricmont's own position, but they do not note this. It would
spoil the fun.

Sokal and Bricmont hold up for ridicule selective passages in Deleuze's
Difference and Repetition concerning the differential calculus. They quote
long passages, followed by the remark that the passage is meaningless or
nonsense (pp. 151-155). They claim that the problems of the calculus were
solved by Cauchy in the early nineteenth century. (They even claim that the
problems "were solved by the work of d'Alembert around 1760," (p. 151)
though d'Alembert did not clarify in terms of inequalities or explicitly
apply the limit concept that he advocates in the Encyclopedia.) They claim
the status of the infinitesimals in the derivative is no longer worth
bothering about, as it has been replaced by the limit.

Sokal and Bricmont's comments on Deleuze on the calculus resemble Bertrand
Russell's comments on Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Russell claimed that the
nineteenth century theory of real numbers and Weierstrass's "static theory
of the variable" solves Zeno's paradoxes (and makes irrelevant the
reflections on them of process philosophers like Bergson). But some later
analytic philosophers noted that showing that mathematics is internally
consistent hardly solves the physical version of Zeno's paradoxes. Unless
one is willing to say that the mathematical structure (of all the real
numbers) is physically existent, or one says that the mathematical formalism
is all we need and that questions of physical reality should be rejected (a
position that a scientific realist would have to reject) then there is still
a physical problem of motion and infinitesimal processes, and the question
of whether an infinite number of acts can be performed in a finite time.
Similarly, Sokal and Bricmont, claim that the question of the status of the
infinitesimal is eliminated by the limit notion. Sokal and Bricmont claim
that Cauchy solved the problems of the status of infinitesimals with the
concept of the limit and criticize Deleuze for puzzling over the status of
differentials. If, indeed, the only consistent way to present derivatives
were by reducing them to limits, this would be true. That is, if the
infinitesimal has been reduced to a meaningless notational component of a
ratio that is really a limit, then puzzling over the status of the
infinitesimal in isolation is made obsolete. However Abraham Robinson's
non-standard analysis (and Lawvere's less well known category theory
approach) has shown how one can make direct mathematical sense of
infinitesimal quantities without resorting to the replacement of their
ratios by limits, and eliminating the individual differentials.

Deleuze seems to borrow some of his discussion from Hegel. Similar
criticism to that of Sokal and Bricmont has been made of Hegel., claiming
that Cauchy's formalization of the concept of limit has made all such
discussion otiose. However some are beginning to reexamine Hegel's writing
on the calculus with less dismissive attitudes than had Whitehead and
Russell.

Marx also wrote philosophical discussions of the calculus. Edmund Wilson,,
consulted a mathematician, who told him that Marx's comments on the calculus
were worthless, and Wilson duly reported this. Some Marxist
mathematicians, on the other hand, have defended the value of Marx's remarks
on the calculus, even claiming he arrived at results similar to Cauchy.
Marx's side-kick Friedrich Engels wrote far worse stuff concerning
elementary algebraic operations and the dialectic. Would leftist Sokal move
from a similar discussion of Marx and Engels on mathematics to discrediting
Marx's insights about capitalism as Intellectual Impostures moves from
Lacan's, Irigaray's or Kristeva's mathematical errors to question their
honesty?

Sokal and Bricmont skip a number of linking passages in Deleuze's
discussion, that treat in great detail writings of various mathematicians
and philosophers. These include early nineteenth century figures such as
the mathematician Wronski (a mathematician with whose Wronskian matrix they
are undoubtedly familiar, but whose mysticism probably embarrasses them) and
the philosopher Salomon Maimon. In one of the passages that they do quote,
they omit by means of ellipsis the reference to Maimon and Wronski's
philosophical approaches to the calculus, that would help make sense of some
of the "nonsense" of the passage. Deleuze does not simply discuss the early
nineteenth century debates on the "metaphysics of the calculus," but also
uses twentieth century philosophers of mathematics, such as Albert Lautman
who wrote in the 1930s and Jules Vuillemin, a contemporary analytic
philosopher. Lautman, whose conception of mathematical problems Deleuze
uses, had a correspondence with great logician Jacques Herbrand and the
philosopher of mathematics Jean Cavaillès, and was praised in a
commemorative volume by the mathematician Jean Dieudonné, suggesting that
his understanding of logic and mathematics was taken seriously by his peers.
Several French philosophers of mathematics were inspired to attempt to build
on Lautman's approach to a logic of mathematical problems and
interpretations because of Deleuze's lectures.

Obviously Deleuze is no mathematical virtuoso, but his treatment of the
issues of the calculus is far more detailed, informed and serious than Sokal
and Bricmont let on. For instance Sokal and Bricmont note in footnotes that
some of Deleuze's errors are shared by Hegel, such as a dated treatment of
functions in terms of Taylor series, but they neglect to note that Deleuze
himself, in discussing Hegel mentions that he is well aware that the series
approach to the calculus has been replaced in modern writers.

According to the standard account of the Sokal hoax, scientifically
illiterate literary critics and sociologists have been bamboozled by the
pretentious claims of French postmodernists concerning science. Ironically
those same benighted scientific illiterates now have to take on faith the
words of physicists Sokal and Bricmont concerning the errors of the French
theorists. In some cases the great unwashed masses of humanists and social
scientists may be misled again.

Val Dusek
Department of Philosophy
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH 03824
USA